A little help convincing my company

[Billabong]

Hey guys,
The company I work creates training simulations for the Department of Defense. They have been wanting to break in to commercial work. mainly archi and product vis. They asked me to come up with a wishlist of desired software. I put Vray as number one. Now I use Vray at home freelancing and have been using it for about 2 years now and love it.

Here is my problem. When I showed them the wishlist, they told me thier artists up in thier other office(main) isn't sold on Vray yet. The problem is thier artists up while good at organic modeling know nothing of the industry and it seems everytime I throw an idea out, they blow it out of the water.

I know though if i can show them the proof of using Vray over Mental Ray they will be sold. My problem is I'm not sure what type of research or proof i can give them. I think what they want to see are commercial companies that use Vray and maybe some benchmark tests comparring it to Mental Ray.

Please don't think I'm trying to start a flame war here, I apologize if it seems that way. I just thought I could use a little help from you guys.

Thanks again

-Brandon

[Morbid Angel]

you should read up here:

http://www.chaosgroup.com/forums/vbu...ad.php?t=43671

Really though, 3 years ago I could say yes, vray is faster, more reliable, more flexible then mr. These days though, mr has made a pretty big leap, and is catching up to vray.

[Billabong]

Thank you Dimitry

[vlado]

While mental ray is trying desparately to catch up with V-Ray, there are still a number of things that V-Ray does better:

(*) V-Ray has physically accurate lights and materials (the arch&design and ProMaterials based on it are not quite so, neither are the mr area lights, including the light portal); of course, any physical accuracy only goes to a certain extent, but in V-Ray things are a lot closer to what you'd expect;

(*) V-Ray has very efficient image-based lighting tools - the texture-mapped dome light, as well as texture-mapped rectangle lights. This will be extended with true object lights in SP3. There are no equivalents of these features for mental ray.

(*) V-Ray handles a lot of lights better;

(*) V-Ray offers much easier GI setup with the light cache;

(*) GI in V-Ray is typically with much better accuracy and detail for equivalent render time compared to mental ray (where you are practically forced to use ambient occlusion to get the same kind of detail);

(*) V-Ray offers more and efficient methods for handling animations (both fly-through and moving objects);

(*) The V-Ray shading pipeline supports efficient layering of materials (e.g. with the VRayBlendMtl material) - equivalent materials in mental ray typically render a lot slower; V-Ray also supports faster and more accurate sampling of reflections/hilights from area light sources and IBL.

(*) VRayProxy is still better than the mental ray implementation in terms of handling larger amounts of geometry and handles motion blur for deforming proxies more accurately;

(*) V-Ray has better displacement with more options (e.g. 2d landscape option);

(*) V-Ray still has faster raytraced motion blur.

It is also worth noting the fact that it is mental ray that takes features from V-Ray, not the other way round For example, final gather in mental ray went through several revisions in the recent years, before finally landing on a solution that is remarkably similar to the irradiance map used originally by V-Ray (of course, this particular fact can be said about the other two 3ds Max plugin renderers ); light portals and proxy objects were originally introduced in 3ds Max by V-Ray etc.

At the same, V-Ray also moves forward and there are many new additions planned to make your lives easier...

Best regards,
Vlado

[DrJan]

At the same, V-Ray also moves forward and there are many new additions planned to make your lives easier...

A "make-nice" button? :P

[Da_elf]

A "make-nice" button? :P

should put one in just for fun kinda like the max teapot button

[Billabong]

Thank you Vlado. That really helps

[cecofuli]

Brillant answer Vlado ! And the beauty is that all true, especially the GI quality. In VRay IMO is much better and fast.

[Erik de Graaf]

Don't forget the Vray community and support!! This forum is great for getting answers and Chaos is always quick with helping people out!

Keep up the good work Vlado!

[mike_kennedy]

For Arch and product Viz I would go VRAY, I use both fairly extensively and Mental Ray is better for FX type work IMHO, Vray kills it for Arch Viz and Product stuff.

[digitalx3d]

I haven't checked this before posting, but isn't the cost of additional render nodes for MR quite costly? Or did they finally include several with each license? If not, that's a substantial benefit of VRay.

And I would like to second the fact that the forum community and direct contact with the developers is extremely valuable. Vlado and the guys have made themselves very accessible. Good luck getting in the door at Autodesk to speak with their dev team.

[Morbid Angel]

I haven't checked this before posting, but isn't the cost of additional render nodes for MR quite costly? Or did they finally include several with each license? If not, that's a substantial benefit of VRay.

And I would like to second the fact that the forum community and direct contact with the developers is extremely valuable. Vlado and the guys have made themselves very accessible. Good luck getting in the door at Autodesk to speak with their dev team.

last I recall, mental ray for 3ds max had become free of charge on the network rendering part, if one tends to use backburner. So, in the essence its the same thing as vray, however there is a slight difference with DR. In mental ray, DR is limited to 8 cpu's per 1 3ds max license. In vray however its not limited to licenses as such.
Also my information maybe outdated a little since I don't work with 3ds max/mr that often.

And as a side note, the story is quite different for maya. Mental ray in maya is not free for network rendering and a studio must buy license per cpu, or per node (I don't remember exactly) its quite painful.